7 -- Sameness as Fairness

Sameness as Fairness is the idea that equality means that everyone gets the same educational instruction, without regard for their individual needs. It is one of those things that sounds good and fair until you scratch the surface. It's another neoliberal idea of running public services like a business, that is, "reform that bring the business of eficiency, accountability, quality, and choice to establish the educational agenda." (Gutierrez 2007, 109). This is the principle behind the No Child Left Behind Act. It's a popular idea among politicians, but it leaves many out in the cold.

Fairness is not that everyone gets the same educational methods, it should mean that everyone gets the same equality of education, which requires methods tailored to the individual.

My liberal point of view usually leads me towards a belief that the government has a role to play in providing basic services to people, such as health care. But when it comes to education, federal control scares the hell out of me, because it leads to sameness as fairness policies. The federal government could never hope to meet the individual needs of students because the various states are too different. The last thing in the world I want is people from Alabama having a say in how children are educated in New York. New York certainly has its problems, and is guilty of relying on high stakes tests and confiningly tight content standards, but New York is a fairly liberal state and it is worse other places.

New York is a diverse state as well, and Albany fails to provide the individualized education that each student deserves. So maybe more control should be given to school districts, who better know their communities and student body, and can tailor curriculum better. But this is still sameness as fairness, because studentshave unique and individual needs.

Only teachers are at the ground level where they can make sure every individual student gets the education he or she needs. Sameness is not fairness, fairness is that everyone gets the education, whatever means they require. Only teachers are in a position to provide this.

9 -- Moses -- "Algebra and Civil Rights"

Robert Moses equates math skills with civil rights and economic equality. I think that Moses is talking, in his own way, about the Culture of Power. The Culture of Power also has a component founded in Math and Science. Moses feels that African-Americans have been denied access to math, which shuts them out of the technological and digital economy. The idea also relates to James Paul Gee's article, "Teenagers in New Times." Moses sees African Americans being shut out of "enchanted worker" positions because they lack proper math knowledge. Minorities are not getting the technical, math and technology skills that they need to succeed.

In part, Moses cites one cause of this math deficiency is because our society values highly reading literacy, but does not value math literacy. I have to admit, I am guilty of this. I've always accepted that I "wasn't good at math." Few adults say they are "not good at reading." Either we are literate or we are not. Either we enjoy reading for pleasure, or we do not. So what people mean is that "I don't enjoy math." This is fine, but cannot be used as an excuse for math illiteracy. Another words, reading is regarded as a necessity, but math is regarded as a talent that you either have or do not.

Math always seems less political to me than social studies and English. History is always fodder for politicians, and often so for literature. Science recently has been very political, such as with the global warming debate. But math is usually accepted as politically neutral. So, it is interesting to the political elements of math raised in the Moses article.

Are there those who have been historically denied the subject I intend to teach? Yes. Yes. Surely yes. This is one of the biggest issues in teaching history. It is an unfortunate truth that history, as taught in public schools, is about dead white men. There is nothing wrong, per se, with dead white men -- I will be one some day, but they are not the only story worth telling. African Americans were slaves for much of American history and they were denied the ability to record their own words and tell their own history. The Chinese were viciously oppressed by the Exclusion Acts in the late nineteenth century, even as they helped settle the west, so their story has not entered the main stream history either. These are just two examples. Many other groups have no place the history taught in the typical public school classroom.

The stories of the "founding fathers" must not be erased, they are important, but they must sit beside, and on equal footing, with the stories of Indians, slaves, the working class, and others, because their stories are also important threads in the tapestry of American history.

We are trying to fix this. The whole of the social studies program at SUNY New Paltz is dedicated to changing this. A new crop of new teachers will enter service in a few years ready and wanting to expand the history books -- but the problem is the rigid social studies standards imposed by Albany that stand in the way.

10 -- Ernest Morrell and concluding thoughts

Critical Literacy and Urban Youth, by Ernest Morrell, is one of my favorites of the whole semester, and a good choice to close the semester, because it is upbeat and optimistic that teachers have the power to change many of the things wrong with American education that we have studied all semester.

Morrell talks about Critical Literacy, by which be means that rather than just read and "appreciate" literature and take the authors technique at face value, we should approach works like a critic. We should analyze and deconstruct the way the text is using language. We shouldn't teach students to not just passively read and accept literature for its own sake, but to question its structure, its arguments, and its methods. This idea does not seem to me as that subversive, maybe because historians in my curriculum do this sort of thing all the time with secondary sources.

Morrell also advocates the use of pop culture and other media to teach critical literacy. One example is the The Godfather/Odyssey lesson plan. This lesson introduces the Odyssey as an epic, by showing that the epic is alive and well in modern movies. It gives an ancient poem like the Odyssey a new relevancy and moves it into the present.

This assignment has given me a greater appreciation for blogging and bloggers. I realize now that the blogosphere is not just crackpot conspiracy theorists barking about the president's birth certificate. It is also a legitimate form of communication.

It was difficult to tie the theme of technology to many of the posts. I was really impressed by the articles about Web 2.0 and the ideas of James Gee and I wanted to say more, but its hard to tie all the ideas together. I'm also sure that I did not discuss and quote from the readings enough, but I felt that we discussed the readings in class, and in the online discussions, and I wanted the blog entries to be more a collection of my own thoughts and feelings about the issues raised in the materials.

I'm not sure that I will continue the blog right now. I am just beginning the teaching curriculum and my ideas are still developing. It is too hard right now to put it all together into a coherent and well reasoned pedagogical philosophy. Maybe after I've started teaching.

6 -- Embedded Literacy

Both the Ladson-Billings and the Gatto readings provide specific examples of the practices outlined by O'Brien & Dillon. For example, O'Brien & Dillon says that we must "Provide more compelling reasons to read." Both Carter, the teacher in the Ladson-Billings reading, and Gatto did this.

Instead of presenting reading and writing as an isolated exercise with no compelling reason to do it beyond the four corners of an assignment. The teachers profiled in these articles present reading and writing as one element of an overall project that engaged students. O'Brien and Dillon say to "Reduce anxiety over reading as a performance or process by focusing on reading as just one avenue towards activity or action." Gatto did this by organizing the butterfly project. Writing journals about the butterflies was one part of this overall project, which also involved research of butterfly development and migration, use of microscopes to study the butterflies, building a vivarium, and even an opportunity to work on translations from English to Spanish, in conjunction with another class. Writing was a vital element of all this, but students got to use the writing as just one tool in an overall project that gave the writing meaning and purpose beyond an exercise.

O'Brien and Dillon further say to "Provide explicit instruction leading to guided and independent practice." We see this strategy with Carter's class. He had students who were not confident that they could write a story. By giving them tasks, each building off one another, he guided them through a project. The Winton Marsalis song first got their interest and provided a hook, then each step, from character web, to writing snippets of dialog, helped build confidence. Thee steps formed the pieces to the final story that they produced.

O'Brien and Dillon say to "Provide ample opportunities for students to receive feedback from teachers and peers" -- Carter makes great use of this practice as well. At several points along the way, he has the students review their classmates drafts in groups. This is not just to critique them, but also provides support. The students help each other, struggle through the drafts together, provide ideas and help work out story elements together.

Gatto and Carter Forsay's work described in the Ladson-Billings article are exciting examples of what Friere advocates in her article "On Banking Education." It is the opposite of the banking method so prevelant in schools. These teachers are not force feeding knowledge to their students, they are making learning an active and lively pursuit. Gatto and Ladson-Billings both present interesting alternative methods to the banking of education.

What would a lesson plan like this look like in my future social studies classroom? The basic idea to Gatto and Ladson-Billing's lesson plans is that it places literacy in a context. literacy is embedded into the project. Instead of learning in isolated pieces of disassociated knowledge, these students are using literacy as a tool to accomplish a project.

In my classroom, literacy will always be a tool to learning history. Students will have to read, research, interpret primary documents, access the arguments of secondary sources, and write their own thoughts about history and its implications on the present and on their lives.

Here is an example of a project in the vein of what Gatto and Ladson-Billings both describe, that relates to a history class.

This is a blog about Harry Lamin, a British soldier in World War I who was stationed in Northern Italy. This soldier's grandson found his letters that he wrote home to his family during the war. The grandson posted the letters, word for word, as they were written, ninety years ago, to a blog -- introducing each letter on the anniversary of the day it was written. He did not reveal what ultimately happened to his grandfather, the blog's followers had to wait for each post to keep up with the story (Harry was a prolific letter writer, so there was usually a letter each day). The blog eventually had thousands of followers and it looks like it is ongoing, although the letters have now extended into 1919 (it looks like Harry stayed in the military after the war ended).

I could see this becoming an excellent lesson plan for a year long side project. I could introduce each letter day by day to the class, let them read it and then post it to the blog. Then they could keep their own journal about their thoughts about Harry (or whatever soldier or person is used for the project). They could reflect on what they would do in a given situation, and what they thought would happen next, and any other thoughts about the events that Harry was living through. Other projects could include research into the historical context -- the cultural and societal elements mentioned in the letters, the historical and political events mentioned. The overall picture that Harry finds himself in. All this research could be posted to the blog as well, as addenda, or as annotations to the letters.

A project like this would place students within the history itself, as experienced in real time by an average person who lived the events. Students would also see a practical use of writing -- the letters represent an important use of literacy in real life. It would also provide students with an opportunity to write and reflect on how people lived in another time. I think a project like this could offer dozens of opportunities to use literacy to learn about history.

5 -- How do we know our students are learning?

"After all these years of common schooling, we still have no real way of knowing if students are learning."

Well, it's very simple right? You pass out a worksheet, maybe students diagram a sentence, find all the nouns or verbs, complete a vocabulary worksheet, and if they get a good grade, we know they are learning. You give a few quizzes, and then the big, high stakes test at the end, and they do well, and we know they are learning. You throw information at them, like shoveling coal into a furnace. They memorize preconceived content, "basic word lists" and "general information. They spit it back in more or less the same order, and we know they are learning.

And then they go home and never open a book again until the next morning. They graduate and become adults who don't read the newspaper and don't keep up with politics, who lack the critical thinking skills to analyze the claims of advertisements or the rhetoric of politicians. They go to work and they come home, and they go shopping, and they question nothing, resist nothing of the life that has been sold to them -- content, satisfied with mediocrity, satisfied to be fodder for every demagogue, evangelist, and swindler to come along. This is because all the content and general information in the world is meaningless if it without context in our students lives. They learn the facts without practicing the skills of learning. Its like teaching students how to drive by having them study a manual, instead of practicing driving.

In my more optimistic moments, I might argue that schools aren't doing so bad. I'm a product of public schools, and I think I turned out okay. I went to college, to law school, to graduate school. I think I'm reasonably informed and literate. All of my class mates have survived the public school system as well, and are now prospering in graduate school.

But then, for the most part, I am from a privileged background and my high school was rather wealthy, and I grew up in a wealthy area. It's not a fair comparison with those who haven't had the same advantages. And it is this divide of class that is the problem in the first place. The wealthy class will always get by -- we will be judged by how we educate the weakest among us.

The only way we can know that our students are learning is if things start to change, if the divide between rich and poor begins to narrow, if poor minorities are graduating with a useful education that serves them well, to help them prosper and escape poverty. If the next generation is better informed, and more active than the own before, if things begin to change for the better, that is how we know children are learning. That is much more meaningful than a score on a report card.

After saying all this, what are we left with? What are the immediate answers? The above is my personal philosophy -- it's that teaching is not a profession that offers instant gratification. We will not see the results of our work right away, it will not materialize between our eyes. Our students probably will not thank us right away for the work we do for them. I think that is something we need to let go of if we are to survive as teachers.

The results will be visible, as I said above, in the future, when our students inherit this society and we see what they do with it. Do they make it a more open and inclusive place? Do they tackle the problems we face with new ideas and new innovation? That will be the assessment that matters.

Post 4: Undervalued Teachers

Before becoming a teacher, I was a lawyer for three years. Lawyers are almost universally hated by the public. Some if it is deserved, but, of course, their are plenty of good, honest lawyers, too. But why do people undervalue lawyers? Because they feel lawyers have too much power, too much influence and they abuse it to make the system work for them.

I think some of this insight can help us understand the devaluation of teachers. Teachers are not despised in the same sense as lawyers are. In fact, teachers get a lot of condescending comments like, "It's a noble profession," which means it's a low paying job no one else wants to do. Teachers are not respected and they are largely not trusted.

I see the undervaluation of teachers as a nexus of a number of factors, all tying back to the concept of neoliberalism. There are a number of players in this drama -- Politicians, parents, education corporations, and teachers themselves.

Teacher's require the trust of parents. Parents leave their kids in our care for most of each day. They make it our responsibility to educate them and, in part, to raise them. Parents often don't know what we are teaching their kids. They don't have time to pay close attention to the material their children are being taught. They also often do not realize that teaching methods and understandings of certain material have changed since they were in school. Parents sometimes see the work their children are doing and if it doesn't bear some resemblance to what they learned in school, twenty or thirty years ago, they are suspicious of it.

Politicians have seen an opening in this and have dived right in. Politicians have realized that is they can turn teachers into enemies and then attack them, parents will support their reelection--it's a simple equation. First, parents want to know what their kids are being taught and want some control over it, so politicians advocate for standardized tests and rigid curricula -- and call it "teacher accountability."

This has the effect of putting knowledge into a preconceived package. Children don't learn what they need to be intelligent, informed citizens -- they learn what politicians want them to learn to make them compliant, obedient cogs for the corporate machine. Politicians sell parents this view of education -- the "agreed-upon facts" theory of history, for example, and it bears a resemblance to what parents learned as students, so they buy this bill of goods -- it gives them a feeling that they are in control.

Once teachers are being evaluated along these lines, teachers find themselves in a dilemma. they can either, conform, teach to the test, and become a part of the system that turns out uninformed consumers; or they can resist it, but fall into the trap, when their students can't pass the standardized tests.

Once politicians have defined the terms, and gotten parents on their side, they can begin phase two. If some teachers aren't willing to fall in line and teach to the test, then maybe they need to be taken out of the equation. So politicians have the opportunity to throw open the door to their favorite ally, corporations. It's the traditional neo-liberal response, create a problem, and then turn to the market to fix it, thereby simultaneously destroying a public institution, and erecting a money-making system in its place.

Education companies put together literacy and other educational systems -- sold to schools at a profit, and guarantee success -- success defined on their own terms. The conundrum of these tests is summarized by Patricia D. Irvine and Joanne Larson in Literacy Packages in Practice, "Standardized tests are a key tool in this political process, especially if they measure competence in the skills promoted by the materials... the assessments that accompany these systems are tautological: They provide their own justification and confirm it in the form of test scores." (2007, 68).

They use the term "teacher proof" to advertise how their programs remove teachers from the process, so now corporations are in the business of educating their own consumers, in the perfect cycle of profit. Parents too often, have been conditioned to trust the promises of a product, over the abilities of people -- that is a biproduct of neo-liberal capitalism.

But I don't want teachers to come across as helpless victims in all this, because we are at fault too. Lawyers are hated because they exercise too much power -- teachers do not exercise enough. And teachers do have power. They have the power of better avenues of communication with parents. Teachers need to use this. We need to be in constant communication with parents, about our lessons, our philosophy and what we are trying to do for their children. We must educate them about the issues that affect their children. In this way, we can turn them to our side. If parents understand that "literacy is a much more complex social practice than mandated instructional programs and assessments can address," (Osborn 2007, 186), they will start calling for change and politicians will have no choice but to listen.

Addendum to Technology post

I'm adding this article that I saw today on MSNBC.com as a bonus post to go with the one about technology. It is about how the Internet is destroying all the old models of doing business.

http://2010.newsweek.com/essay/a-decade-of-destruction.html

The first decade of the new millennium saw the rise of a supremely disruptive technological force: the Internet.

By Daniel Lyons

• 
  

The Internet is everywhere

Richard Bangs / Business Wire via Getty Images

The past decade is the era in which the Internet ruined everything. Just look at the industries that have been damaged by the rise of the Web: Newspapers. Magazines. Books. TV. Movies. Music. Retailers of almost any kind, from cars to real estate. Telecommunications. Airlines and hotels. Wherever companies relied on advertising to make money, wherever companies were profiting by a lack of transparency or a lack of competition, wherever friction could be polished out of the system, those industries suffered.

Remember all that crazy talk in the early days about how the Internet was going to change everything and usher us into a brave new techno-utopia? Well, to get to that promised land, we first have to endure a period of what economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction,” as the Internet crashes like a tsunami across entire industries, sweeping away the old and infirm and those who are unwilling or unable to change. That’s where we’ve been these past 10 years, and it’s been ugly.

Let’s start with newspapers. You wouldn’t think that in an information age the biggest victim would be purveyors of information. But there you go. Newspapers are getting wiped out in part because they didn’t realize they were in the information business—they thought their business was about putting ink onto paper and then physically distributing those stacks of paper with fleets of trucks and delivery people. Papers were slow to move to the Web. For a while they just sort of shuffled around, hoping it would go away. Even when they did launch Web sites, many did so reluctantly, almost grudgingly. It’s hard to believe that news companies could miss this shift. These companies are in the business of spotting what’s new, right? Yet they were blind to the biggest change (and the biggest opportunity) to ever hit their own business. Watching newspapers go out of business because of the Internet is like watching dairies going out of business because customers started wanting their milk in paper cartons instead of glass bottles.

Newspapers are getting wiped out because the Internet robbed them of their mini-monopolies. For decades they had virtually no competition, and so could charge ridiculous amounts of money for things like tiny classified ads. This, we are told by people who are wringing their hands over the demise of newspapers, was somehow a good thing. Good or no, it’s gone, thanks to Craigslist, which came along and provided the same service at no charge. Whoops.

TV is in the same boat. For decades we had three big broadcast networks. They weren’t exactly a monopoly, but close enough; with so little choice, the networks could aggregate huge audiences and charge outrageous fees for advertising time. Along came cable, which brought in dozens of competitors. This hurt a little bit, but when the Internet arrived, the dam burst. Suddenly the number of “channels” soared as high as you can count. There is no limit. It’s infinite. That sudden surplus has drained ad money from TV networks, which is why TV is now jammed with low-cost junk—reality shows, cable “news” that owes more to Jerry Springer than to Walter Cronkite, Jay Leno on five nights a week in prime time—taking the place of scripted shows, which cost more to make. Basically, TV is on a race to the bottom, cutting costs to stay ahead of the destruction. This may be a short-term fix, but simply putting out a worse product is probably not the way to survive.

The music business has suffered even more. First there was Napster, distributing music at no cost. Apple’s iTunes Store offered a path to survival, but it forced the music companies to cede control of their industry to Steve Jobs. As for music retailers—remember them? Yes, children, there used to be actual stores that you could walk into and buy music, on CDs and even on vinyl record. You don’t see many of those about anymore.

As for the film industry, Apple now offers movie studios the same Faustian bargain it made with music companies: “You just focus on making movies, and let us take care of digital distribution.” But the movie guys remain wary, and at the very least would rather deal with many different digital distributors and not let any single distributor get too powerful. The studios realize that the digital revolution is disrupting their business. The best they can hope to do is slow down the disruption.

But it’s not just stodgy old-fashioned companies that have been hurt by the rise of the Internet, even tech companies suffered damage. Before the Internet came along, Microsoft ruled the computer industry. Tiny software companies lived in Microsoft’s shadow, and they knew that if their business struck gold, Microsoft would offer them an unpleasant choice: either sell your company to us for a pittance, or we’ll create software that mimics your product and put you out of business. Microsoft bullied rivals and business partners alike, until the latter squealed to the U.S. Department of Justice, which brought an antitrust case against the software giant, resulting in a judgment against Microsoft in 2002.

These days nobody fears Microsoft. The company has become a stumbling, bumbling joke. That’s not because of the government, however. What really tripped up Microsoft was the Internet. Microsoft’s business model was based around waiting for others to innovate, then making cheap knockoffs of what others were selling. Microsoft copied Apple to make Windows. They copied Lotus and WordPerfect to make Excel and Word, then bundled those apps into a low-cost suite called Office. They copied Netscape Navigator to make Internet Explorer, and then gave it away free, tied to Windows, and killed Netscape. But then the copycat model stopped working. Why? For one thing, Microsoft got slower, while everyone else got faster. The new Web-based companies, like Yahoo and Google, needed little money to get started and could scale up quickly. Google figured out keyword-search advertising and got so big so fast that Microsoft could not drag it back. Apple rolled out the iPod and then the iTunes store, and by the time Microsoft realized that selling music online was a big market, it was too late—Apple had it sewn up. The same is true of Amazon with the online retail market, and the Kindle, and its cloud-computing services.

Now Microsoft finds itself racing to catch those companies, even as it invests resources and energy into defending its money-making products like Windows and Office. It’s a case study that could have sprung from the pages of Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen’s book The Innovator’s Dilemma. Microsoft is too big to get swept away. But it’s too wedded to the old world to make it across into the new one. It is quickly becoming irrelevant—maybe not as much as the average newspaper, but close enough.

The Internet has changed pretty much every aspect of our lives over the past decade. Is that for the better or the worse? Depends on who you ask.

Lyons is technology editor for NEWSWEEK. He blogs at Techtonic Shifts.